Space Mutiny (1988)

August 17, 2000

by Nathan Shumate

Produced and directed by David Winters
Written by Maria Dante
Starring
- Reb Brown
- John Phillip Law
- Cameron Mitchell
- Cisse Cameron

Uh. Ubba duh. Dubbuwuh ugga dubbaduh.

You’ll have to pardon me. My brain is currently in the middle of rewiring around damaged sections of my cortex, due to my recent viewing of perennial IMDB Bottom 100 denizen, Space Mutiny. The neurons in question were not savaged by an aneurysm, nor throttled by a stroke; they simply lost all will to live. Duggagah baggah duh…

The video cover has the temerity to proclaim, “Breathtaking Special Effects From the Team That Brought You ‘STAR WARS.’” Well, technically, I suppose, that’s sorta true. See, all of the outer space footage in Space Mutiny was cobbled from episodes of Battlestar Galactica. All of it. Very obviously. And since John Dykstra did do special effects for Star Wars and then move on to Battlestar Galactica… My personal feeling is that honesty would be better served by stating, “Breathtaking Special Effects Taken From an Original Source Which Employed the Team That Brought You ‘STAR WARS,’” but when did honesty ever sell movies?

Our story takes place on the Southern Star, a huge generation ship on its way to found a new colony. And yup, there it is, the Galact– uh, the Southern Star, drifting through space. It’s run by Commander Jansen (Cameron Mitchell, whose amazing career spanned five decades of bottom-of-the-barrel crap, with a big fuzzy beard), who’s still trying to fulfill the mission of the original pioneers four generations later. But there are some aboard who are getting impatient, and chief among them is Flight Commander and Enforcer Fascist Kalgan (John Phillip Law, most famous for Barbarella – and let me tell you, there ain’t no one who can mwah-ha-ha-hah like this guy). Not that I blame them; aside from the bridge and a few other sets, the entire rest of the ship looks suspiciously like an industrial factory, with pipes and catwalks and all that stuff. Seems that in four generations aboard, they could have found some time for a little interior decorating.

Anyway. Kalgan’s plan involved sabotaging the auto-pilot controls that bring their Viper fighters (gee, those look familiar) back on board the Gala– uh, Southern Sun after they fight off a handful of “pirates” flying very familiar clamshell-shaped ships. All it will take is one well-placed crashland in the docking bay, and no one will be able to leave or enter the ship for weeks, during which time he’ll effect a mutiny, and force the ship to head for the nearby system of Corona Borealis, a pirate-run planet on which he’ll become the sadistic yet benevolent despot over the Southern Sun inhabitants. Mwah-ha-ha-hah!

In this particular case, only one pilot makes it back anyway from a run-in with the Cylo– uh, pirates: big brawny blond Dave Ryder, brought to life for us by Reb Brown. Yes, this is crap movie fave Reb Brown of the late ’70s Captain America TV-movies and of Yor, Hunter From the Future, and yes, punchlines involving either of those enterprises are entirely apppropriate for the next hour and a half. Ryder escapes the crashland thanks to an experimental ejection teleporter thingie; his passenger, a Professor Spooner, isn’t so lucky. (We never do get to find out who this professor was, or why he was outside the mothership, or where he was coming back from. Perhaps he was just glad to get out of this movie without ever showing his face.)

It is during his debriefing that Ryder meets Commander Jansen’s daughter, Lea. Naturally, since Lea really admired Professor Spooner, she blames his death on Ryder, and presto! we’re hip-deep in the well-worn rut of Romance Through Antagonism. A note about Lea (played by Cissy Cameron, whose other credits include The Ted Knight Show and Porky’s 2): She may be wasp-waisted, and she may be the designated love interest here, but she also bears an appalling resemblance to Miss Michael Learned, who played Ma on The Waltons, and frankly, seeing Ma Walton eventually surrender to the charms of Yor was a little more than I needed to anticipate.

Before we get any farther, I should note that a Galactica-issue shuttle made it back to the Southern Sun (see, I said it right) before the crashland, carrying survivors from some other shipwreck. The survivors are Bellerian women who wear veils and don’t speak because they’re telepathic and anyway, they don’t have anything to say. Given a cargo room to themselves (love that Southern Sun hospitality), they immediately set up a pyramid of plasma globes and do interpretive dance around it. You may be waiting for them to do something more in the course of the story; don’t. They contribute nothing. Every now and again they act as if they’re going to make a prophetic statement or psychically influence the bad guys, but then nothing happens. So they just strut around, doing veiled interpretive dance.

Speaking of dancing, we can now segue into the single most impressive scene of the movie. Of course, it wasn’t meant to be that way — at least, not impressive in the hilariously, mind-bogglingly inept way it turned out. See, every generation ship needs after-hours entertainment, and the Ga– Southern Sun (dammit) is no exception, thus there’s a nightclub. And being that this movie was made in the eighties, the music to which everyone is future-dancing is pure eighties disco. And since this is a grade-z sci-fi movie, everyone’s costumes are silvery and have huge epaulets (including Ryder, who is graced with the only silvery epauleted muscle-T in the movie). But since these people in the future are really desperate for novelty, they do their dancing with hula hoops.

I gaped. I stared. I hooted like a barn owl in derisive merriment. There they were, extras in silver suits, all dancing around with hula hoops. And then, to sweeten it, Lea comes in to blow off some steam, and spends the next several minutes cutting a rug with a hula hoop and shaking her groove thang at Ryder, with whom she’s decided to patch up.

Folks, there’s no way mere words can describe the sheer loopiness of this scene. It salved, for several seconds, the numbness of brain cells fading into obscurity.

From here, it’s all downhill.

Ryder and Lea catch wind of Kalgan’s Enforcers rubbing out a bridge officer who may have evidence of their sabotage, which leads us into a long bumper car chase, and many explosions and stunt men throwing themselves off catwalks. (What’s the big deal? Next scene on the bridge, there’s the bridge officer, hale and hearty in the background! You don’t see continuity gaffs of that caliber often enough.) And since they can’t use Battlestar Galactica footage to pad the scene, they do the next best thing: reuse their own footage. We get to see one particular explosion four times from the same angle.

I could go on with the plot description, but I can feel the still-alert neurons looking wistfully at their gangrenous companions, so I’d best stop reliving it in such detail. As for the plot, suffice it to say there’s a lot more pointless running around in vaguely industrial locations and people falling from catwalks where, more than once, red tanks are piled up with a sign — “Danger! Methane Gas!”; there’s some more romancing between Ryder and Lea (including a flash of nipple — remember when you could slip those into a PG movie?); there’s a battle against more pirate ships in which everyone conveniently forgets that the Southern Sun’s vipers can’t leave the hangar (or are we just supposed to ignore those Colonial fighters in the stock footage?); and the Bellerians keep up their interpretive dancing at random intervals for no apparent purpose and with no apparent effect. Both Ryder and Lea demonstrate their graduation from the B-Movie School of Cliche Gambits (he knocks out a guard and steals his uniform at the exact moment that she’s seducing her lone guard to get him close enough to club).

I can’t say conclusively that Space Mutiny deserves to be in the IMDb Bottom 100 (currently ranking at #10, right behind such fare as Future War (#1), Troll 2 (#5) and The Howling: New Moon Rising (#7)), but that’s only because I haven’t seen all movies made and can’t prove that there aren’t a hundred films worse than this. Certainly, it seems as if second-string schlock director David Winters went out of his way to create a worthless movie. Between the epaulets, the 8088s which populate the terminals of the bridge, the “spaceship” corridors constructed of brick, the endless and recognizable stock footage (wouldn’t that be the first rule of stock footage — don’t use footage from recognizable and recognizably-better sources?), the paucity of acting talent, and the guy with a cane who looks like Billy Drago’s less talented brother…

Under recommendations (“If you like this title, we also recommend…”), the IMDb lists Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier. Somehow, I can’t think of a comment that sums it up better.